The default rules which govern how the SSA-NAME3 key-building, search strategy and matching routines operate for a given population of data are contained within files called Standard Populations. The SSA-NAME3 product includes Standard Populations for over 50 countries and languages. These are the files with an extension of

.ysp

.

Occasionally, customers with unusual needs may have a Custom Population built for them by Informatica Corporation, either using an existing Standard Population as a base, or from scratch if dealing with a totally new type of data. These files have an extension of

.ycp

.

These Population rule files are not viewable as text files and can only be accessed via the SSA-NAME3 callable routines (i.e. from an application program), or via one of the packaged GUI clients:

While the SSA-NAME3 Standard Populations will satisfy the majority of customers’ needs, occasionally a user will have the need to override, disable, or add new rules because of the specific local content of their data.

The Population Override Manager is a Java GUI tool that allows a trained data analyst to override some of the Standard Population rules that are supplied with the product, or provided in the form of a Custom Population.

An example of this need might be to add a new rule to cater for some specific types of noise words found in the user’s data, but not commonly found in data representative of the population. For example,

XXX

has been used by a company’s data entry operators to denote that an address has an unknown street number. In this example, a data analyst trained in the use of the Population Override Manager could add a new noise word rule for

XXX

. This activity will result in the generation of a Local Population.